


What's Bred in the Bone

by Kitty_Highball



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Christmas, F/M, Lycanthropy & Snark, No Plot/Plotless, Pre-Relationship, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 15:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15270534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitty_Highball/pseuds/Kitty_Highball
Summary: Lupin, Tonks, and a rambling conversation at 3 in the morning in the kitchen of 12 Grimmauld Place.





	1. The Night Before

**Author's Note:**

> It's July. In July, we write Christmas fic. 
> 
> I feel like the various bits of this fic are better than the sum of its parts, but oh well. Lupin and Tonks were my first proper OTP back when I first discovered fandom, and I had an unexpectedly good time revisiting them both for this fic. 
> 
> Despite being almost 6000 words, this fic has no plot and many tone shifts. I like to think of it as being basically a little slice of life with all of the wild conversational digressions that normally arise between friends at 3 in the morning. Think of it as 'Mike Leigh goes to Hogwarts' and you won't be far off.

Remus Lupin kisses much the way he does everything else: precisely and politely and with an amused air of detachment at some private joke. It’s the little things that give him away, thinks Tonks. The sound he makes in his throat which is as much pleasure as it is surprise, the way his left hand comes up to skim her cheek and ear before settling decorously on her shoulder.

She opens her eyes mid-way, and decides that if it all gets too awkward, she’ll blame Arthur Weasley’s eggnog. Eggnog and Christmas cheer and the fact that 12 Grimmauld Place has _vicious_ mistletoe. Sirius spent a full four minutes that afternoon clobbering one fanged sprig into paste with a mop after it tried to intimidate him into snogging Kreacher. The garland hanging above them has a particularly nasty looking specimen, and she’s about to take Remus’ shoulder and settle into a better position for the long haul, but then the mistletoe scuttles off into a corner,  and they are awkwardly pulling apart.

“Well,” he says after a minute, “That was certainly, uh...unexpected.” His voice stutters slightly, and she can see a pulse thudding at the base of his throat and in his temple.

“Well,” she says, aping his professorial register, “It _is_ Christmas, Lupin. The whole point is to eat too much, drink too much, and finish off the evening in a darkened corner somewhere, impersonating the Giant Squid.”

He laughs. “Whatever happened to larger goals like ‘peace on earth, good will to men’?”

“Urgh, whoever thought up good will to men never worked with Dawlish.”  She lets herself flop sideways, pinning him against the doorjamb in a friendly fashion. “I’ve got early shift tomorrow. Who schedules a 4:30 to 8:00 shift on Boxing Day anyways? I might as well just stay up all night.”

“Mmm.”

She can feel the vibrations from his voice burring and humming against her ear, and has to suppress the urge to rub her face against his wooly jumper. Remus is nice and warm, if more than a little bony, and so she stays leaning against him, listening to his heart beat and letting her hands dangle at her sides, feeling boneless and slow.

“Tonks?” he says quietly.

“Mm-hmm?”                          

“Perhaps you could stand somewhere that isn’t on my foot?” His voice is warm and good-humored, but there’s a discernable tension.  Although she thinks that could be because he’s craning his neck upwards, and leaning awkwardly to the side, clearly looking to see where the mistletoe has skulked off to.

“Sorry,” she says hastily. She catches an earring on his jumper when she lifts her head from his chest.  “Sorry,” she says again, struggling with tiny metal clasps. “Oh Merlin’s pants, I’m stuck. Should come with a warning, really, shouldn’t I?”

Remus laughs. “What, don’t operate while inebriated?”

He has beautiful hands, she thinks. Gracious, aristocratic wrist bones arching out into a cellist’s hand span. His middle and index fingers on each hand are, she realizes with a spurt of amusement, the same length. The Muggle folklorists would have a field day.  Those long balletic fingers move her own hand out of the way, and detangle her ear from his chest and, feeling more than slightly giddy, she tries to move hastily away from him, and stomps on his other foot extricating herself.

“I,” she announces, “have definitely had too much eggnog. I think Arthur spiked it with Ogden’s.”

“I’m beginning to think he spiked it with a sleeping draught,” says Remus. He gives her a quick, apologetic smile. “I may have to desert you shortly; I’m sinking fast.”

What he doesn’t say, because they both know it, is that the full moon was only two days ago, and, she thinks, she hasn’t actually seen him eat or drink much of anything apart from water all day.

She draws herself up and, in the most withering voice she can summon, thinking of her mother at her most dismissive, says, ”Go, Lupin, go. The Most Ancient and Noble House of Black permits you to go drink hot cocoa and nurse your squashed feet. Ooops. Balls.” Her extravagantly imperious wave towards the door has sent two gold-rimmed dishes of the Most Noble House of Black spinning to their demise on the flagstone floor.

Remus would normally be the first person to grin and cast a _reparo_ charm, but instead, he’s utterly silent, and when she looks away from the plate fragments, he’s frozen against the door jamb, whey-faced and staring at her with what looks almost like horror.

“Remus?” she says uncertainly. “Mate? You alright?”

For an awful moment, she thinks that he might be about to collapse, and she reaches towards him, wondering if she has enough arm strength to break what looks like an inevitable fall, and about to bellow for Sirius. But then the colour comes flooding back into his face and he takes in a long deep breath, a drowning man restored to the surface, and manages a grimace of a smile and shifts back slightly, just out of her reach.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Fine. It’s just…” he trails off and clears his throat. “Just a bit of a turn,” he said finally, but she can see one of those beautiful hands white-knuckling the doorjamb.

“You need to sit down,” she says, bluntly. “Here.” She hauls out a chair from the table, kicking plate fragments into the corner, and puts her hand under his elbow. He flinches, but Tonks decides that the time for niceties is past, and she frog-marches him the few feet to the chair and unceremoniously dumps him into it.

She riffles through the plethora of Christmas dinner leftovers on the counter, wondering where a good Muggle box of Quality Street is when you need it, and shovels two mince pies, a cup of tea with three sugars, and a handful of brightly wrapped candies down in front of him.

Remus, looking squeamish, pokes gingerly at one of the candies. “I think I’ll forgo these. I have my suspicions as to their origins, and a Nougat Nosebleed isn’t something that I want to receive for Christmas.”  He manages a smile. “Thank you for the tea though.”

“You sure you’re all right?” she says suspiciously.

“Yes. Thank you.” But there’s clearly something he isn’t saying.

A little known fact about Nymphadora Tonks is, she thinks, that she can, on occasion, with good reason, be patient. And if there’s one thing that her favourite local werewolf dislikes almost more than anything else, it’s a deeply awkward silence.

There is a deeply awkward silence. It continues. It continues until Sirius comes barging through the door carrying a stack of dirty plates, an orange paper crown hanging off of one ear.

“Why’re you both in here, the party’s out – hell’s bells!” he says, staring at Tonks and only just managing to retain his grip on the wavering crockery stack. “Why’d you morph into Bellatrix? Give us all heart attacks, little cousin.”

“I – what?” she says, bewildered. She looks at Remus. He gives a faint smile.

“It nearly gave me one,” he said. “I almost thought it was Polyjuice wearing off until I realized that Bellatrix wouldn’t be caught dead in jeans. And that – “ he stops abruptly, and flushes  scarlet from throat to forehead and buries his face in his teacup. Sirius is watching them both with a raised eyebrow and a far too knowing eye, but all he says, kindly, is, “Maybe you should lay off the eggnog, Tonksie. The last time I saw you morphing without realizing it, you were in diapers.”

She gapes like a dimmock at the pair of them, and starts to speak but can’t think of anything to say. She puts her hand up to her cheek and feels the planes of a face, her own, natural face, that she hasn’t voluntarily worn since her mother vanished her aunts from all of the Tonks family photos when she was four. She thinks that she should say something, but all that comes out is a strangled, ragged sound. She panics and tries to morph back, back to a face that heart-shaped rather than feline, eyes that are blue like her father’s rather than grey and heavy lidded, bright pink short hair rather than the dull,straight, mousy blonde that now spills past her collarbone. The morph starts and stops and starts again and jerks to a halt and she feels like her lungs are too big for her chest, her ribs clamping down on them, and then she is panicking, really panicking because now her hands are morphing into claws and her ears are ratcheting through a wild variety of shapes and sizes and she can’t stop it any of it and –

“Here.” Her cousin’s hands grab the back of her head, and jam her face into a hastily conjured paper bag. She gives an indignant squawk.

“Breathe into the bag,” says Sirius firmly. “Remember, Moony?  That was rule one of babysitting.”

She is puffing heavily into the bag, but can feel the claws retracting, can feel her hands resuming a normal shape, can feel the tingle in her ears beginning to lessen and her ribs expand again. “Babysitting?” she finally manages to say.

“We were trusted with you exactly once,” says Remus drily. “You were maybe two and a half. It wasn’t a successful afternoon for anyone.”

“Don’t remember,” she says, wheezing.

“You morphed your legs into an emu’s within the first half hour, and then screamed hysterically for the next four hours until Andromeda got home.”

“We couldn’t figure out how to get you to morph back,” says Sirius. “Andromeda said that you could usually be forced to change back by breathing into a paper bag like the Muggles do, but it didn’t work. We thought you’d scream yourself sick; Moony ended up carrying you up and down the living room for ages, trying to get you to calm down, but you just kept crying and kicking him in the shins with your pointy emu feet.”

By the time Sirius pulls the bag away from her face, she’s recovered enough to be able to ape her normal self and raises her arms towards Remus across the table. “Come on then Lupin,“ she says, “Relive those moments.”

“As heart-warming as that would be, I don’t think my shins could take it,” says Remus. His smile is teasing, affectionate, but it fades quickly into a more anxious gaze. She doesn’t need a mirror to know that her face is still as nature and the Black family tree have made it.

“Well,” says Sirius. “The bag trick seems to have worked this time anyways. The claws have gone, although I did rather like them.” He gently jostles Tonks’ shoulder. “Look, come have a butterbeer and a game of Exploding Snap before everyone calls it a night.”

“I – “ she clears her throat. She doesn’t know how to say that she would sooner die than she would go into a room with Order members and Weasleys and Harry Potter looking like a mirror image of Bellatrix Lestrange. She wonders wildly if she could just put the paper bag over her head instead, and go around like that until everything goes back to normal.

“I think perhaps Tonks might just want a bit of quiet for a bit,” says Remus blandly, and where normally she’d want to tell someone off for talking on her behalf, she instead feels inordinately grateful and a bit teary.  Merlin, but she is thoroughly drunk, she realizes, standing up.

“I’m just going to…” she gestures towards the door and mumbles, “…powder nose” and stumbles her way out. It’s a minor miracle that she doesn’t trip over anyone’s boots in the hall, and she struggles her way up the stairs and into the refuge of the second floor bathroom where she can curl up in a ball and cry if she wants to and no one will be able to hear her.

She doesn’t cry after all, but the face in the mirror makes her feel panicky and sick, and she can’t face going back downstairs when she does bring herself to leave the bathroom.

The guest bedroom down the hall is hers for the night – she’ll be sharing with Ginny Weasley, but Ginny is still downstairs, and with any luck, this will just be an aberration caused by eggnog, and her morphing will be back to normal come the morning.

She shuffles her way along the hall, waits for a break in the noise from below, bellows “Goodnighthappychristmas” down the stairs, and crawls into bed and pulls the covers up over her head. The dark engulfs her, and comes as a relief.


	2. The Morning After

She’s set a silent alarm charm, and it pokes her violently and repeatedly on the shoulder until she grunts and peels herself off of the pillow, wishing that she’d had the foresight for a hangover potion.

12 Grimmauld Place is quiet at three o’clock in the morning. There are the faint rustlings and creaks of an old house at night, the velvet dark in the corners of the rooms, where the sodium spill of light from the streetlights against the window panes.

She picks her jeans up from the bottom of the bed where she’s left them, and eases into them and her boots as quietly as possible, cold air prickling on her bare arms. Across the room, Ginny sleeps like the child she still is, arms flung wide, snuffling softly with that glorious Weasley hair stuck to her face. Tonks tiptoes past her and pulls the door to.

The wide upstairs hall is as silent as the grave, and as cold as one, and she can’t remember if she left her cardigan in the living room or the kitchen.

The kitchen is empty apart from the Kanchenjunga of dirty dishes on the table and counter. Tonks counts herself lucky that they don’t topple over just from her being in the same postcode zone, and having ascertained from a distance that the sweater dropped on Sirius’ chair is a Weasley creation and not her own purple and green confection, she tries the living room.

The living room door is closed, but she can see the light around the edges, and when she stealthily slides the door open, there is indeed a light on, casting a golden pool on the corner of the rather lumpy couch and its occupant, and on her cardigan, draped over the back of the couch.

 Remus has fallen asleep reading. He’s slouched crookedly on his back across the couch, a scuffed paperback book fallen to the floor, one long foot dangling crossed over the other, a hand laying loose on his chest. Like Ginny, he mutters restlessly in his sleep, his body splayed out and vulnerable, worry lines replaced by a long crease on one cheek where the couch pillow seam has been pressed against his face.

 She’s as quiet as she can be, snagging her cardigan and turning to go, but something – a movement in the air, the faint creak of a floorboard beneath her toes – makes him grunt softly and open his eyes and wrench himself up into a sitting position, groping for his wand before he realizes where he is and who she is.

“Tonks,” he says, visibly relaxing, and giving her a bleary sleep smeared smile.

His hair is wildly askew on one side, and he looks about ten, and she feels suddenly, violently, fond of him. If she had more courage, she’d ruffle the other side of his hair until it’s also standing on end. As it is, she says, “Wotcher wolvie,” and holds up her cardigan, dangling off one finger, explanation and apology for waking him all in one. 

He grimaces as he sits fully upright, the long line of his back uncurling up, a hand pressed to the base of his neck.

“’S what I get for falling asleep on the couch,” he says. “Is that you off?”

“In an hour or so. Just going to get some coffee first. D’you want some?”

“I should really go up to bed,” he says thickly, scrubbing his hands across his face. The play of lamplight and shadow on his face has erased all traces of boyishness. In the dark room, the bones of his face stand out stark and bare, and she has a sudden vision of what he must look like transforming, bones peeling through the skin, tendons and veins a dark tracery down the inside of his forearms.

But he follows her to the kitchen, and, yawning hugely (sharp white teeth in the still room), sets out two mugs while she boils the kettle.

She roots about in the Christmas leftovers again, and settles on a Belgian biscuit for breakfast, and a small packet of goose and potatoes to take with her for lunch along with a slab of Christmas Cake big enough to concuss a Death Eater with.

Remus pushes her cup of coffee across the table to her, and assesses her lunch with the eye of a man accustomed to gauging how long leftovers will normally last. 

“You’re not going to take some cheddar with that cake?” he says.

She screws up her face in response.

“What?” he says. “You’ve never had fruitcake with cheese?”

“I knew you lot all had warped taste,” she says.

“What, werewolves? ”

“Yorkshiremen, actually.”

“If I weren’t still half asleep, you’d be in trouble,” he says, fishing about in the icebox.

She takes her lunch out to put in the pocket of her bag, and by the time she comes back in, he’s assembled a little Christmas cake and cheese sandwich, and is eating it neatly over a plate.

Tonks in turn crams three-quarters of her Belgian biscuit into her mouth at one go, sweeps the crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand, and tips them back into her mouth. Across the table, Remus visibly winces, and it’s 50/50 whether it’s from a crick from the couch, or from her appalling table manners.

She swallows the biscuit down in one melting lump of butter and sugar, and follows it with a gulp of strong, sweet, coffee.

“Alright, then,” she says, extending her hand across the table. “Hand it over.”

About to bite into his sandwich, Remus raises his eyebrows. “ Pardon me, _Nymphadora_?”

She lets that one go. “Cake with cheese.” She waggles her fingers at him. “Let’s see what all the fuss is about.”

Remus moves back out of her reach, and holds his cake over his head as she elongates her arm. “Get away. You can get your own, my lass; this one’s mine.”

“Spoken like a true Yorkshireman,” she says.

“Werewolf, actually. We don’t like to share.”

“You share. I’ve seen you.”

“Under duress only.”

“ _Accio_ cake!” says Tonks in a moment of inspiration, and triumphantly catches a handful of cake and cheese out of mid-air as it flies out of his hand towards her and bounces off the kitchen cupboards. A lump of cake drops into her coffee, and another bit splats down onto the previously clean table.

Remus stares at her. “You just stole my cake! You…you cake thief!”

“Lupin, you should know by now that in this house there are the quick and then there are the disappointed,” she tells him. She squishes the cake and cheese back together into a semblance of unity.

A slight smile quirks up the corner of his mouth as he picks up his coffee mug.“You must be feeling better.”

“Hmm?”

He gestures with his mug. “Your hair’s back to pink again. You were quite bothered by that last night,” he says, watching her over the rim of his cup.

She shudders. “Wouldn’t you be?” she says. “Drunk as a skunk and wandering around looking like Voldemort’s red right hand?”

“You looked more like Andromeda than you did like Bellatrix, if it helps at all,” he says. “Not unlike Sirius either, you know, in the cheekbones, or even Narcissa, in the colour of the eyes.”

“What can I say?” she sighs. “The Black family gene pool is both shallow and murky.”

“Good looking though,” says Remus rather cheerfully, given what they’re discussing. “As horrible as she is, I do have to say that Narcissa Malfoy on the surface is still the most spectacularly beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. Although we never could resist the temptation to suggest that she was part-Veela, and watch her hit the ceiling.”

“You were at school with-?” Tonks starts, and then realises that of course he was.

“Same year,” he says pleasantly. “In our OWL year, I actually ended up being paired with her for remedial Potions.”  
“I don’t know what to be more shocked by,” says Tonks. “You having to take remedial anything, or that someone thought it was a good idea to put you and Narcissa alone in the dungeons together for a year. I’m surprised she didn’t eat you alive.”

“Oh, she made it very clear that she wasn’t pleased. We were only paired up because I really was rubbish at Potions, and she was exceptional. A very light hand with very tricky potions. She’d make a fabulous Wolfsbane brewer if she wasn’t so bigoted.”

“Wait,” says Tonks. “Wait, my brain can’t cope with this. I thought that you were both in the same remedial class, but you’re telling me that Narcissa was your remedial Potions _tutor_?  My world is askew. I think I need to eat more cake now to recover. Urgh,” she says after a minute. “I was right, Lupin. You do have warped taste. You don’t want this back, do you?”

He looks utterly horrified. “Not now you’ve put your grubby fingers and teeth all over it. You can keep your Auror germs to yourself, thank you very much.”

“So,” she says, swallowing a mouthful, all sweet and salty and sharp. “What was she like at school?”

“Narcissa? Much the way she is now. A shining beacon of light and humanity.” He takes a tidy sip of coffee. “Why do you ask?”

She shrugs. “Just curious, I suppose. I hadn’t thought about it before. How so many of the Death Eaters in the first war would have been your – “

“Classmates? Yes.” he says briskly. “I must say that did make it rather handy in a number of cases – knowing what someone’s fighting style is, or how they’re likely to respond in a given situation.” He sees her expression and raises an eyebrow. “Have I said something amusing?”

She shakes her head. “Just…you’re actually quite ruthless, aren’t you? You hide it well, I must say, under that whole mild-mannered professor act.”

He gives a faint shrug. “I’ve had a lot of practice. Hiding things.” He sounds remote suddenly, austere, and she can feel him drawing away even as he sits there.

“That was a compliment, Remus,” she says. “From one ruthless person to another.”

He starts to laugh. “Should I assume that all of this,” he gestures towards her hair, “is in fact just in its own turn a façade?  A misleading exterior meant to-“

“Fool people into underestimating me, yeah?” she says. “To do this job, to do it well, you have to be willing to be ruthless. The day I felt like a proper bone fide Auror was the day that I passed my license to use the Unforgiveables in a combat situation.”

She takes a deep breath, and looks up from her coffee cup, across the table at Remus.  His face is quiet, and open, listening.

 “In the first war,” she says, feeling her way through. “Was it – I mean – did you-?”

He raises an eyebrow. “This seems to have taken a very dark turn all of a sudden. I think that what you’re trying to ask is have I ever used an Unforgiveable Curse on someone?”

She takes a deep breath. “Have you?”

He stands up abruptly and carries his mug over to the sink. It’s a deliberate tactic, she thinks, when he could have washed and put it away using magic as easily as snapping his fingers.

“Yes,” he says. His voice has a pleasant finality meant to put an end to the conversation, and she can see the tension in the line of his back, in the hunch of his shoulders.

“What was it like?”

He swings round upon her. “I’m not sure why you’re asking this, Tonks? What is it you’re hoping to get from this conversation?” His arms are crossed across his chest, and he’s fixed her with a rather intimidating eye.

She breathes out carefully. “I haven’t had to use any of the Unforgiveables yet,” she says.  “It frightens me that one day soon I’ll have to.”

His shoulders ease downwards. “That’s not a bad thing, Tonks.”

“Except you’re assuming that you know what’s frightening me,” she says.

He cocks his head to the side. “Go on.”

She’s put her mug down, and this time, openly, deliberately, she lets her current morph go. She feels the shifting under the skin as her cheekbones rearrange, the sudden itch on her neck as her hair slips down onto her shoulders.

She waves her hand, with exaggerated nonchalance, at her face. “You have to _mean_ the Unforgiveables to use them, Remus. Every woman in the Black Family tree hasn’t just meant them when we’ve used them, we’ve meant them with a vengeance. I wasn’t joking about being ruthless. What’s that Muggle saying? ‘What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh?’

“Ah,” he says. “You think that absolute power will corrupt absolutely, do you? Nymphadora, with all due respect, you’re the least likely person – “

“Lupin,” she says, and he stops speaking. “Look at my face. Look at it.” She holds his gaze as steadily as she can. “This is me. This is who I am.  I’m a Black bred and buttered. There’s no getting around it. I’m not frightened of casting an Unforgeable; I’m frightened of who I’ll be after I’ve cast it.”

“Tonks, I don’t want to make light of your concerns, but…” he sighs. “I’m beginning to worry that you’ve built up that façade of being a…a bimbo so long that you’re in danger of actually turning into one?”

She picks up a largeish crumb of cake from the table, and throws it at his head. “Lupin, I’m trying to have a serious conversation here.”

“I am being serious,” he says, ducking and banishing the cake to a corner of the room. “Tonks, you might be the most stable person I’ve ever met. Why on earth do you think that looking like your relatives is about to turn you into a nascent Death Eater?”

“For the same idiotic reason that you seem to think that being a werewolf predisposes you to being too dangerous to have a girlfriend?”

“That,” he says, far too calmly, “is a completely different case in point. And, for the record, it does.”

Tonks snorts. “It’s exactly the same, Remus. I can change my shape ‘til I’m literally blue in the face, but it doesn’t change the fact that underneath, this is who I am, and this part of me is what people see and judge.  Did Kingsley ever tell you that my Ministry record is flagged? Twice, I might add. Once for all of the fruitloop relatives, and once for being a  Metamorphmagus. The only reason I’m not classed as a Dark Creature is because Fudge thinks there aren’t enough of us to pose a genuine threat in the same way that werewolves or hags do. So I have to say that I’m not really seeing the difference here between the two of us.”  She laughs, suddenly. “Although did you ever think that you might have no problem getting a girl if you didn’t so whoppingly underestimate us?”

“Really?” he says, and his voice is now dangerously calm. “Underestimate people how, precisely? In their capacity for fearing with good reason? In their capacity for ignorance and prejudice?”

“No,” she says. “ _Us_. Women. It may have escaped your notice, Remus, but fifty-one percent of the wizarding world also have a tendency to turn into homicidal lunatics once a month. If you think you’re dangerous at a full moon, you should see Ginny Weasley’s Bat Bogey Hex. The only reason that’s not an Unforgiveable once every 28 days is because no one’s taught her how to cast them yet.”

Remus stares at her, and she can see a slow tidal wave of a blush creeping up towards his ears.

“What I’m saying,” she says. “is that most women know exactly what it’s like to feel depressed and irrationally furious and violently out of control for no discernable logical reason once a month as well. The only difference is that because most of us just about manage not to kill anyone over it, it gets written off as a female stereotype, and joked about in pubs, instead of anyone taking us seriously as a threat.” She pauses “How’m I doing in the bimbo stakes, Lupin?”

“Clearly miles better than I am,” he says, after a minute, ruefully, and very, very red. “D’you know, that never once occurred to me.”

“It’s alright” she says, kindly. “You’re only a bloke, after all.”

He sighs. “A bloke prone to biting chunks out of you if you get too close at the full moon.”

She grins. ”Join the club, Lupin.”

His eyebrows fly upwards. “Er, Tonks, if you’re about to divulge some, er, well, personal information, I don’t think that-“

“Gary Stephens,” she says.

“What?”

“Gary Stephens. He’s an absolute dropkick who works down the hall from Arthur. Two months ago, I was alone with him in a lift, and he put his arm out to block the door so I couldn’t get past him. At any other time of the month, I’d have said something, or hexed him, but I was just feeling weepy and angry and fed up with everything and so instead I just panicked and, well, I bit his arm right through his work robes. I hear that he takes the stairs now.”  She looks up and catches Remus’ eye. He looks like he doesn’t know whether to be appalled or to burst out laughing. 

“To go back to my original point,” he says, finally, mouth twitching, “May I just remind you that had you in fact been as similar to Bellatrix or Narcissa as you’re worried about, that interaction would have ended very differently for the unfortunate Mr Stephens?

“That is true,” she says. “Tell me honestly, Remus. Do you think that I’ve been worrying over nothing?”

He hesitates. “It’s not nothing, Tonks. And it was wrong of me to dismiss your concerns just because they sound irrational. Casting an Unforgiveable…it does change you. You do cross a line, no matter how you dress it up with how the end will justify the means, and you can’t go back. I suppose for me, because I had spent so much of my life being worried that each full moon I might accidentally hurt or kill someone, to then deliberately…well.” He blew out a slow breath. “For me, the Unforgiveables were something that I could control. Whereas you’re-“

“Worried that the Black family inbreeding is nutty enough that as soon as I cast an Avada Kedavra I’ll wind up like Bellatrix with all the self-control of a rabid Hippogriff being taunted by small children waving pointy sticks and dead rabbits? Yeah.”

He blinks. “Leaving aside what might be the worst analogy I’ve ever heard, I really don’t think that you’ve got anything to worry about, Tonks. Except being late to work,” he adds.

“Bugger,” she says, looking at the clock. “I _am_ going to be late.”  She swallows the last of her coffee, and pushes back her chair.  “I’ll have to run.”  She puts her hand lightly on his shoulder as she goes past him, and hears his breath catch in his throat.

Remus follows her out in the hall, and leans against the wall, hands thrust deep in his pockets as he watches her pull her coat on and wind her scarf around her neck. He clears his throat. “Do you think you’ll be back later? I’m sure Molly’ll want to know for dinner.”

She wonders if he knows how transparent he is. She rather thinks not. In fact, she rather thinks that talking about Unforgiveable curses with Remus Lupin might be the most intimate conversation she’s ever had with him, and he doesn’t even realise it.

“Not sure,” she says. “I think Mum’s expecting me to grace them with my presence; she keeps saying how nice it is that I’ve finally got a bit of time off instead of working double-shifts.”

“Ah, well,” he says. “Enjoy – I’m sure I’ll see you when I see you.”

“And you,” she says. “Have a good day. Get some sleep,” she says, pointing a finger at him.

“Indeed,” he says. “I’ll just get the door behind you.”

“Cheers.”

He’s standing close enough behind her that she can feel the heat and tension prickling off him as she unlocks the door.

She turns back to look at him before she opens the door. She’s about to say ‘Merry Christmas,” and call it a day, but-

“Oh no,” she hisses, casting her eyes to the ceiling.

“What – oh not more mistle-umph,” Remus staggers back slightly as she launches herself squarely into his arms and presses her mouth to his.

He’s perfectly still for a moment, but then his arms go around her, and he’s kissing her back, properly this time, deep and warm, tasting of coffee and sleep still, his hands sliding up to card through her hair. When they do finally break apart, they stand paralysed in the dark hall.

“I-“

“We’”

They start to speak at the same time, and stop. Remus opens his mouth – his mouth that she has just soundly kissed and been kissed by, thinks Tonks – but she can see him change his mind the instant before he speaks, and he says only, looking upwards, “D’you think it’s gone?”

“The mistletoe?” she says. It restores a bit of normality, and she can’t resist telling him the truth. “It was never there in the first place, Remus.”

“I – what?” He stares at her.

She grins. “Just remember, Lupin,” she says. “Fifty-one percent. Have a think about it. Merry Christmas,” she adds, pulling open the door.  

Outside, the snow has picked up, but she steps out and Apparates without looking back.


End file.
